Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Franklin Roosevelt
Ike’s son, historian John Eisenhower, recalls attending meetings with the British wartime leader and reflects on his character and accomplishments.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s evolving relationship with African Americans challenged her beliefs about herself and the world she had been raised in.
Editor’s Note: David Michaelis is the author of seven books, including the bestselling biography, N. C.
FDR's Secretary of Labor — the first female Cabinet member — also helped create the minimum wage, 40-hour work week, and first tough child labor laws.
Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor at American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.
When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.
Editor’s Note: Americans can accomplish amazing things when roused to action by strong leadership.
Daisy Bonner, who cooked for Franklin Roosevelt for twenty years in the Georgia White House, recalled his favorite dish.
She functioned as Franklin Roosvelt's de facto chief-of-staff, yet Missy LeHand's role has been misrepresented and overlooked by historians.
Debate over America's involvement in World War II came to a head in July 1941 as the Senate argued over a draft extension bill. The decision would have profound consequences for the nation.
On July 19, 1941, when Gen. George Catlett Marshall, Army chief of staff, stepped before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, his gray civilian suit could not disguise the proud bearing of a soldier and commander of men.
After 65 years, the archives of FDR’s personal secretary are now open to the public
On June 30, 2010, 14 boxes containing a treasure trove of more than 5,000 personal letters, notes, and photographs from the Roosevelt administration and his family arrived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.
The world-shaping relationship between these two giants got off to a rocky start
Often it is said that vast long-range economic and social forces, not the efforts of leading individuals alone, make history. The course of World War II denies this seemingly rational thesis.
1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement.
2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.
Why Have Our Presidents Almost Always Stumbled After Their First Four Years?
A novelist who has just spent several years with them tells a moving story of love: public and private, given and withheld
In the FDR Library in Hyde Park, among the effects of Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the only daughter of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, there is a scrap of yellowing paper, about four inches by five.
The campaign to revise Hitler’s reputation has gone on for 50 years, but there’s another strategy now. Some of it is built on the work of the head of the Gestapo—who may have enjoyed a comfortable retirement in America.
RECENTLY, ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS, the American public has been made aware of evidence of plagiarism practiced, alas, by celebrated American historians. This is regrettable, but nothing new. All kinds of writers have borrowed and, worse, stolen from others through the ages.
At a time when it can offer answers to urgent questions, we have forgotten America’s long history of “nation building.”
In late January 2002 Hamid Karzai, the newly installed leader of Afghanistan, visited Washington and New York. He received a standing ovation at the President’s State of the Union address, and glowing press attention, in no small part because of his gentle demeanor and splendid attire.
It has been with us since Plymouth Colony. But that’s not why it’s an American institution.
On September evening in 1918, while unpacking an overseas bag for her husband, who had returned from a fact-finding tour of war-torn Europe with double pneumonia, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a cache of love letters from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer.
When the two parties gather to select their candidates, the proceedings will be empty glitz, with none of the import of old-time conventions. Or will they?
The United States and FDR watched the extermination of the Jews with such total indifference that they were actually accomplices — or so says a growing number of historians. Is this true?
It was Winston Churchill’s judgment that the Holocaust “was probably the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” The Holocaust, of course, was part of a colossal struggle in which fifty-three million people were kil
Half a century after his father’s death, he struck up an extraordinary friendship with a man who had been there
My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea.
The English journalist has spent more than a decade preparing a book on this country’s role in the most eventful hundred years since the race began. He liked what he found enough to become an American himself.
Evans likes to refer to The American Century as “history for browsers.” There are searching essays at the start of each chapter, but most of the book consists of tiropage spreads concerning particular people or events.
…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.
IT’S MORE THAN JUST A POTENT DRINK, AND MORE THAN THE INSPIRATION FOR SOME HANDSOME ANCILLARY EQUIPMENT. IT IS MODERN TIMES, BROUGHT TO YOU IN A BEAUTIFUL CHALICE.
In November 1943, as Allied leaders met in Teheran to plan the defeat of Nazism, Franklin Roosevelt asked Joseph Stalin to join in a toast. Inevitably, at that moment in history, the drink the American President offered was a dry martini.
In an exchange of letters, a man who had an immeasurable impact on how the great struggle of our times was waged looks back on how it began.
And how it grew, and grew, and grew…
The federal government was still in the process of establishing itself in 1792 and did not have a good year financially. Total income was only $3,670,000, or 88 cents per capita. Outlays were $5,080,000. The budget deficit therefore amounted to fully 38 percent of revenues.
In 1943 Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Britain’s poorest, most dismal African colony, and what he saw there fired him with a fervor that helped found the United Nations
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not look favorably on European colonialism. Like most Americans, he believed that the self-determination clause of the 1941 Atlantic Charter should apply to all peoples, not just Europeans.
For a sense of the continuity of the of the terrorist tradition in America, consider this actual sequence of events: The FBI smashes a dead-serious plot to overthrow the federal government and reveals that for more than a year the right-wing militias involved
As the war was coming to an end, we asked the German guards if we could hold a ceremony in Roosevelt’s honor
The heavy cannonading in the east told the American POWs in Kommando 64/VI that the war was almost over. We had survived the brutally cold Baltic winter in this satellite labor camp of a German stalag and were now enjoying the first tenuous rays of the spring sun.
What were the protocols for deploying nearly two thousand people?
In the late afternoon of Thursday, April 12, 1945, my wife and I were relaxing on the front terrace of our West Point quarters. Such a mild, sunny day seldom came to the Hudson Valley so early in the spring.
THE GREAT STRUGGLES of our century have all been followed by tides of revulsion: Americans decided we were mad to have entered World War I; Russia should have been our enemy in World War II; the United States started the Cold War. Now another such tide has risen in Europe, and it may be on its way here.
HISTORY IS REVISIONISM. IT IS THE FREQUENT —nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past.
Of all the Allied leaders, argues FDR's biographer, only Roosevelt saw clearly the shape of the new world they were fighting to create
AFTER HALF A CENTURY IT IS HARD TO APPROACH FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT EXCEPT through a minefield of clichés. Theories of FDR, running the gamut from artlessness to mystification, have long paraded before our eyes.
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